The Corrupt Edition of The Courier's Tragedy in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49

Abstract

THE underlying1 mystery in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 revolves around a corrupted edition of the Jacobean play, The Courier's Tragedy. A good part of Oedipa's quest as heroine is for a published copy of that edition of the play.2 The hypothesis here is that Pynchon's focus on the corrupt edition of the play signifies the corrupt edition of Henry Adams’ Letter to American Teachers of History, that was published after his death.3 The writing of Henry Adams had a major influence on Thomas Pynchon's short stories and novels. In his introduction to Slow Learner,4 in which Pynchon shared some rare confidences about his work, Henry Adams is mentioned twice. David Seed5 attributes Pynchon's fascination with thermodynamic entropy to Adams’ Letter to American Teachers of History,6 which contains the phrase ‘the entire universe, in every variety of active energy, organic and inorganic, human or divine, is to be treated as clockwork that is running down’, that resonates in the allusion to the ‘universe running like clockwork’ in The Crying of Lot 49.7 The central thesis of Adams’ Letter is that human vitality and thought are forms of active energy that are running down as a consequence of the entropy law. Because Adams had privately printed only a small quantity of the Letter, his brother, Brooks Adams, republished it a year after Henry's death as part of a larger volume entitled The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, on whose title page he listed Henry as the principal author and identified himself, modestly but misleadingly, as simply the author of the introduction.